Various countries throughout the world have started their efforts in designing and implementing smart cities. China alone has over 300 smart city projects, with strong participation by industries and government offices. India too have allocated trillions in budget to build over 100 smart cities. An essential part of a smart city is transport. In this paper, we will discuss the current state, developments, and some of the emerging advances in transportation technologies and how these advances in smart roads will prepare the society towards the realization of future smart cities. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/tas-120.html © 2020 The Author(s).It is known that the stretching and bending deformations will be coupled together for the unsymmetric composite laminates under in-plane force and/or out-of-plane bending moment. Although Green's functions for unsymmetric composite laminates with elliptical elastic inclusions have been obtained by using Stroh-like formalism around 10 years ago, due to the ignoring of inconsistent rigid body movements of matrix and inclusion, the existing solution may lead to displacement discontinuity across the interface between matrix and inclusion. Due to the multi-valued characteristics of complex logarithmic functions appeared in Green's functions, special attention should be made on the proper selection of branch cuts of mapped variables. To solve these problems, in this study, the existing Green's functions are corrected and a simple way to correctly evaluate the mapped complex variable logarithmic functions is suggested. Moreover, to apply the obtained solutions to boundary element method, we also derive the explicit closed-form solution for Green's function of deflection. Since the continuity conditions along the interface have been satisfied in Green's functions, no meshes are required along the interface, which will save a lot of computational time and the results are much more accurate than any other numerical methods. © 2020 The Authors.This paper exploits the theory of geometric gradient flows to introduce an alternative regularization of the thin-film equation valid in the case of large-scale droplet spreading-the geometric diffuse-interface method. The method possesses some advantages when compared with the existing models of droplet spreading, namely the slip model, the precursor-film method and the diffuse-interface model. These advantages are discussed and a case is made for using the geometric diffuse-interface method for the purpose of numerical simulations. The mathematical solutions of the geometric diffuse interface method are explored via such numerical simulations for the simple and well-studied case of large-scale droplet spreading for a perfectly wetting fluid-we demonstrate that the new method reproduces Tanner's Law of droplet spreading via a simple and robust computational method, at a low computational cost. We discuss potential avenues for extending the method beyond the simple case of perfectly wetting fluids. © 2020 The Author(s).Diffusion maps approximate the generator of Langevin dynamics from simulation data. They afford a means of identifying the slowly evolving principal modes of high-dimensional molecular systems. When combined with a biasing mechanism, diffusion maps can accelerate the sampling of the stationary Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution. In this work, we contrast the local and global perspectives on diffusion maps, based on whether or not the data distribution has been fully explored. In the global setting, we use diffusion maps to identify metastable sets and to approximate the corresponding committor functions of transitions between them. We also discuss the use of diffusion maps within the metastable sets, formalizing the locality via the concept of the quasi-stationary distribution and justifying the convergence of diffusion maps within a local equilibrium. This perspective allows us to propose an enhanced sampling algorithm. We demonstrate the practical relevance of these approaches both for simple models and for molecular dynamics problems (alanine dipeptide and deca-alanine). © 2020 The Authors.Background Despite prior studies, transitions in smoking patterns are not fully understood. Getting arrested may alter an individual's smoking pattern through processes proscribed by the criminological labeling theory. This study examined how arrest during emerging adulthood altered smoking behavior during subsequent years and whether there were differential effects by race/ethnicity and gender. Methods We analyzed 15 waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Multinomial logistic regressions were performed using Stata software version 14. Results For both genders, arrested black men and women had the most distinct smoking transitions (both increases and decreases) as compared with their non-arrested counterparts. Among men, particularly black males, arrest in early adulthood was associated with the men transitioning to both increased and decreased smoking. Patterns in smoking transitions for women were less clear, suggesting that women's smoking may be influenced by factors not in thelic health officials can provide guidance regarding the effect of justice system involvement on smoking, particularly given the adverse health outcomes of using cigarettes. © The Author(s) 2020.Background Influenza causes significant morbidity and mortality in adults, and numerous patients require intensive care unit (ICU) admission. Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is clearly described in this context, but other clinical presentations exist that need to be assessed for incidence and outcome. The primary goal of this study was to describe the characteristics of patients admitted in ICU for influenza, their clinical presentation, and the 3-month mortality rate. The second objective was to search for 3-month mortality risk factors. Methods This is a retrospective study including all patients admitted to 3 ICUs due to influenza-related disease between October 2013 and June 2016, which assesses the 3-month mortality rate. We compared clinical presentation, biological data, and outcome at 3?months between survivors and non-survivors. We created a predicting 3-month mortality model with Classification and Regression Tree analysis. Results Sixty-nine patients were included, 50 patients (72.5%) for ARDS, 5 (7.